technology

After having been in the IT industry in some form or fashion for the last decade or so, I’ve learned that no matter how well you prepare yourself for disaster, you never seem to be surprised by certain issues that present themselves. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I’m talking about the many surprises our friend Mr. Murphy can throw at us. I’m sure many a tech will anecdotally speak of the time where their server borked on them, their backups failed despite numerous backup audits, and they were up the infamous creek (I’m only assuming at least a few readers are nodding right now). Sometimes painful lessons are the best times to learn, but it’s a bad day when it happens on a production server.

Working in the SoftLayer data center, we take incredible measures to protect our customer’s servers. In a sense, we try to keep Mr. Murphy away. From the biggies (like redundant power and MASSIVE cooling units) to the routine (such as the data center walkthroughs, and proactive RAID alerts), we do our best to keep the servers in the data center running smoothly, and free of surprises.

Beyond the punches our friend Mr. Murphy can throw at us now and again, it’s nice to know there are a few good surprises in store for you, too. You might be surprised at the great deals our SLales team can provide. You might also be surprised at not only the amazing features such as the new Cloudlayer™ Storage, but the incredible rate we keep bringing new features to the table. I’ve also seen customer’s surprise when we rescue their server from the brink of disaster, or when we are able to provide a few tweaks to give THEIR business the edge it needs.

Furthermore, our people keep the data center interesting. SoftLayer sees no shortage of antics. There’s John’s fully automatic Nerf gun. There’s also plenty of jokes played at the expense of someone unfortunate enough to leave their workstation unlocked (call it “security training” – favorite backgrounds include the Care Bears and My Little Pony). We also have that one hardware tech who likes to hide around corners or sneak up behind you, and scare the life out of you while you’re focused on the task at hand.

With so many surprises, SoftLayer continues to be a very interesting place to work, and most certainly a place where one would never get bored!

Social Networking in my eyes has been around for years since the old bulletin board system days, though now with the advancement of technology and the internet, we see it on a much larger scale. I remember in 2004 I told myself I would never join Myspace. That turned out to be wrong in October of 2005 I joined and connected with friends from the past.

Then came facebook, I once again refused to become a member of another social networking site, though in 2008 I joined to help diagnose one of our customers issues as they hosted an application on the site. I then later found additional friends that had one or the other, so I started using both to stay connected (Still all wondering why no one just uses email like it was intended for instead of just for notifications from your favorite social sites).

I then joined a more professional social networking site, LinkedIn, and became connected with former co-workers, contractors, professors, students, and industry people. Then came twitter, which I just signed up for a few months ago and haven’t really gotten into it, as I feel it is the same as status updates on facebook and myspace, while thinking to myself, do I really need to update my friends with what I am doing every hour on all three. No I don’t think so, but I have friends that do!

My blackberry has five main applications that are used on it: Email; Browser; SMS messages; Myspace; and Facebook. All get checked about every 30 minutes so I can stay in the know about everything from work, to friends. I rarely use personal email for things anymore as most of my friends contact me on one of the social networking sites. I have often thought about deleting one or the other if not both. I find myself telling myself, why it’s like when you disconnected text messaging from your cell phone in 2000 because you hated it, you’ll sign right back up for it as it has became an essential in my life.

I can’t say I couldn’t live without social networking sites, but it would require me to reorganize how I organize my already busy life. My answer is yes, social networking has changed my life and how I interact with people. Social Networking can be a very vital tool, if you are a restaurant / bar, band, sales person, etc. You can use Social Networking to expose yourself to that many more people and reach out!

Now I’m off to install TwitterBerry and see if that makes me like twitter anymore, ask me in three months.

SL: Hey, The elevator was acting strangely this morning. I wanted your opinion on a few things.Printer: *whir*

SL: Excellent, I’m glad to hear your enthusiasm. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about how the web hosting industry seems to be weathering the storm of the global economic downturn quite well. It seems regardless of the bank bailouts, failed mortgages, and credit crises, there is still a high demand for social networking applications, online shopping and exchange of information via the many forums available. Furthermore, with the reliability of our redundant links, businesses are finding it more affordable to outsource their IT assets, and host with us.Printer: PAPER_EMPTY

SL: I Get it. By hosting here, you can also begin the transition to a paperless business. Something to the effect of a tech taking an X-Ray, uploading it to an SL server through the private uplink, and instantly having it available to a doctor thousands of miles away. And that’s just one possibility out of the endless uses for a server here. We have a ton of space available, and by design, we use approximately a square foot per server in our Datacenter… How’s that for space efficiency?Printer: WARMING_UP

SL: Yea, it gets pretty toasty in there, but luckily we have environmental controls in place to mitigate the heat put out by the thousands of servers in the pods. We also have monitoring in place to notify us of any possible situations. As uptime is vital in the web hosting industry, we have a number of features available both internally and externally. We have 24/7/365 monitoring, automatic reboots, and a highly intuitive customer portal. Not to mention the best technicians in the industryPrinter: *beep*

SL: Now that’s just rude. We have staff from every facet of IT working in our NOC every day of the year. With the highly skilled staff holding years upon years of experience, there are few issues that can’t be solved quickly and efficiently.Printer: PAPER_JAM

SL: Doubtful. We continue to innovate in efficiency and features. Now you’re acting just like the elevator.Printer: PC_LOAD_LETTER

SL: Ugh, you’re just as bad as the Elevator. What does that mean, anyway?

When it comes to managing a server remember you can never be to careful. In this day and age we face a lot of things that can damage and even take a server to its knees here’s a few things for everyone to consider.

Anti-virus:

This is a must on systems open to the net now days. There are always nasty little things floating around looking to take your server apart from the OS out. For windows servers there are a multitude of choices and I’ll just mention a few that can help protect your goods. You can use several programs such as avast (which offers a free edition), ClamWin (open source), Kaspersky , and Panda just to name a few. I would suggest before installing any of these you check links such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_antivirus_software to name one that provides a list of several choices and their compatibility. You may also want to read reviews that compare the available options and give you an idea of what to expect from them. This will allow you to make an informed choice on which one works best for you. Now with linux there are also several options for this including the well known clamav which from personal experience works really well and can be installed on a variety of linux disro’s(aka distributions). It’s very simple to use and may prevent you from headache later on down the road.

Firewalls:

Firewalls are a double edged sword but are most defiantly needed. When it comes to firewalls you can protect yourself from quite a bit of headache however if setup to strict you can block positive traffic and even yourself from reaching your server but in the long run a defiant way to help protect your server from unwanted visitors. A lot of firewalls also have modules and add-ons that further assist in protecting you and securing your server. If in doubt it’s always a good idea to have a security company do an audit and even a security hardening session with your server to make sure you are protected the best way possible.

Passwords:

This is probably one of the most important this you can do to secure your server. Use strong passwords (no using password or jello is not a secure password even if it is in all caps) and if you are worried about not being able to come up with a secure one there are several password generators on the web that can come up with secure ones to assist. Passwords should contain caps letters, numbers, symbols, and should be at minimum 8 – 10 characters (the more the better). It’s the easy to remember and easy read passwords that get you into trouble.

Armed with this information and so much more on security that can be located on the web using the great and all powerful Google should be a good start to making sure you don’t have to worry about data loss and system hacks. Also remember no matter how secure you think you are make regular backups of all your important data as if you server could crash at any time.

From the beginning of my coming of age in the IT industry, It’s been one thing – Windows. As a system administrator in a highly mobile Windows environment, you learn a thing or two to make things tick, and to make them keep ticking. I had become quite proficient with the Active Directory environment, and was able to keep a domain going. While windows is a useful enterprise-grade server solution, it’s certainly not the only solution. Unfortunately when I made my departure from that particular environment, I hadn’t had much exposure to the plethora of options available to an administrator.

Then Along comes SoftLayer, and opens my eyes to an array of new (well, at least to me) operating systems. Now, I had begun my ‘new’ IT life, with exposure to the latest and greatest, to include Windows, as well as virtualization software such as Xen and Virtuozzo, and great open source operating systems such as CentOS, and FreeBSD. With the new exposure to all these high-speed technologies, I felt that maybe it was time for me to let the de-facto home operating system take a break, and kick the tires on a new installation.

I can say that while switching to open source was a bit nerve racking, it ended up being quick and painless, and I’m not looking back. I’ve lost a few hours of sleep here and there trying to dive in and learn a thing or two about the new operating system, as well as making some tweaks to get it just like I like it. The process was certainly a learning experience, and I’ve become much more familiar with an operating system that, at first, can seem rather intimidating. I went through a few different distributions till I settled on one that’s perfect for what I do (like reading the InnerLayer, and finishing the multitude of college papers).

The only problem with always reloading a PC is you have to sit there and watch it. It doesn’t hurt to have a TV and an MP3 player sitting around while you configure everything and get the reload going, but you still have to be around to make sure everything goes as planned. Imagine this… You click a button, and check back in a few. Sound Familiar? Yep, it would have been nice to have an automated reload system much like we have here at SoftLayer. Not to mention, if something goes awry, there’s the assurance that someone will be there to investigate and correct the issue. That way, I can open a cold one, and watch the game, or attend to other matters more important than telling my computer my time zone.

When you think about all the things that have to go right all the time where all the time is millions of times per second for a user to get your content it can be a little... daunting. The software, the network, the hardware all have to work for this bit of magic we call the Internet to actually occur.

There are points of failure all over the place. Take a server for example: hard drives can fail, power supplies can fail, the OS could fail. The people running servers can fail.. maybe you try something new and it has unforeseen consequences. This is simply the way of things.

Mitigation comes in many forms. If your content is mostly images you could use something like a content delivery network to move your content into the "cloud" so that failure in one area might not take out everything. On the server itself you can do things like redundant power supplies and RAID arrays. Proper testing and staging of changes can help minimize the occurrence of software bugs and configuration errors impacting your production setup.

Even if nothing fails there will come a time when you have to shut down a service or reboot an entire server. Patches can't always update files that are in use, for example. One way to work around this problem is to have multiple servers working together in a server cluster. Clustering can be done in various ways, using Unix machines, Windows machines and even a combination of operating systems.

Since I've recently setup a Windows 2008 cluster that is we're going to discuss. First we need to discuss some terms. A node is a member of a cluster. Nodes are used to host resources, which are things that a cluster provides. When a node in a cluster fails another node takes over the job of offering that resource to the network. This can be done because resources (files, IPs, etc) are stored on the network using shared storage, which is typically a set of SAN drives to which multiple machines can connect.

Windows clusters come in a couple of conceptual forms. Active/Passive clusters have the resources hosted on one node and have another node just sitting idle waiting for the first to fail. Active/Active clusters on the other hand host some resources on each node. This puts each node to work. The key with clusters is that you need to size the nodes such that your workloads can still function even if there is node failure.

Ok, so you have multiple machines, a SAN between them, some IPs and something you wish to serve up in a highly available manner. How does this work? Once you create the cluster you then go about defining resources. In the case of the cluster I set up my resource was a file share. I wanted these files to be available on the network even if I had to reboot one of the servers. The resource was actually combination of an IP address that could be answered by either machine and the iSCSI drive mount which contained the actual files.

Once the resource was established it was hosted on NodeA. When I rebooted NodeA though the resource was automatically failed over to NodeB so that the total interruption in service was only a couple of seconds. NodeB took possession of the IP address and the iSCSI mount automatically once it determined that NodeA had gone away.

File serving is a really basic example but you can clustering with much more complicated things like the Microsoft Exchange e-mail server, Internet Information Server, Virtual Machines and even network services like DHCP/DNS/WINs.

Clusters are not the end of service failures. The shared storage can fail, the network can fail, the software configuration or the humans could fail. With a proper technical staff implementing and maintaining them, however, clusters can be a useful tool in the quest for high availability.

One thing I have noticed about my SoftLayer family is the number of musicians here. I spent nine years as a musician, working the bar/festival circuits all over the midwest. When I arrived at SoftLayer, people jokingly asked if I was joining the SoftLayer band due to my previous experience. Just looking at the Operations Management Team, most of us have written/performed and many continue to. The more I thought about it, I think that this is a good thing.

There have been a number of scientific research projects about the academic performance of children and teens who are involved in a music program at school. The mixed left/right brain activity of music lends itself to problem solving and critical thinking as well as creativity which are required by many jobs. A musician's mind is capable of working complex geometric patterns into physical movements in coordination with muscle memory. Once more advanced levels are reached, a musician is capable of not only composing music, but also improvisation. These aspects are similar to many necessary thought processes used in the office.

I'd like to think that these mental processes allow me to think better on my feet, deal with change, and have a global view of the projects that I am involved with. Maybe that's why our Inventory, Hardware, & 2/5 Datacenter Managers are musicians. Not only that, but our Director of Operations is an avid musician. If you count the actual system admins who are musical, then you would be adding another 3 people.

So if all the research is correct, this may have something to do with the quality of operations here at SoftLayer. I wonder if being a musician had anything to do with my interview and its result. I know that it would catch my attention knowing that an applicant had experience with music or any other analytical/creative endeavor, especially if it has been shown to improve overall performance or intelligence.

Maybe I should write a SoftLayer song - an anthem to our Datacenter or a love song about the management network and IPMI?

You'll see the word "cloud" bouncing around quite a bit in IT nowadays. If you have been following The Inner Layer you'll have seen it a few times here as well. A cloud service is just something that is hosted on the Internet. Typically in a cloud scenario you are not actually doing the hosting but rather using hosted resources someone else is providing. Usually you'll hear it in terms of computing and storage.

This is going to be a brief article on a cloud storage product we are doing here at SoftLayer called CloudLayer™ Storage.

CloudLayer™ Storage is a WebDAV based system which uses client software on the local machine in order to redirect filesystem operations to the storage repository here at SoftLayer. In Windows you end up with a drive letter; on a Unix system you end up with a mount point. In both cases when you create folders and save files on those locations the actions actually happen on our storage repository here. Because the files are located with us you are able to access them wherever you are. Through the CloudLayer™ web UI you're able to also set up files for sharing with others so even if where you are never changes there is still value to using the cloud storage.

Even using a cloud storage system you must maintain proper backups. Hardware, software and human error all happens. Tied in with that concept of "errors happen" ... if you have files on CloudLayer™ that you need for a presentation, download them ahead of time. You don't want to be caught without files simply because the Internet connection at your hotel decided to take a nap the morning of your event.

Now what of security? Well, the connection to the CloudLayer™ endpoint here at SoftLayer is done via an encrypted session so people cannot snoop on your transmissions. This does mean you need to allow 443/tcp outbound communications via your firewall but since that is the normal HTTPS port I'd imagine you already have it open. Within CloudLayer™ you can control with whom you share your files.

Since CloudLayer™ is a filesystem redirected over the Internet the performance you get will be dependent on your local connection speed. Its best to treat CloudLayer™ Storage as simply a file repository. If you find you need some kind of off-machine storage for running applications on your server you could look into our iSCSI product.

Last weekend, I attended an event that indicates that Facebook has more staying power than those old CB radios. It was a quasi high school reunion. Since a lot of graduates of Brownwood High School (my alma mater) wind up in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area, a 2-3 hour drive away from Brownwood, we had a get-together in Grapevine, TX for Brownwood High grads living in the area.

At the event, the oldest grad I bumped into was from the Class of ’81 and the youngest I saw was from the Class of ’90. Yes, there’s a “19” in front of those graduation years, making the age range of people I saw between ages 37 and 46 years of age. I won’t disclose where I fit in that group, but in the world of Facebook, we’re all pretty much “geezers” I imagine.

I wish I had counted the number of times I heard Facebook mentioned at the party on Saturday night. Many times people told of who they had found on Facebook that couldn’t make it to the party. Some of the comments I overheard went like this:

“I saw those pictures of your kids on Facebook. Man they’ve grown!”

Q: “So, is that crawfish boil you posted on Facebook an annual event?”
A: “Yeah, it got kinda wild this year.”

“You said in your Facebook status a while back that your daughter got hurt. How’s she doing now?”

You get the drift, I’m sure. Most everybody there in this age range was active on Facebook and was already connected to several in attendance on Facebook. Since the event, I’ve received friend requests from folks I saw, and I’ve also sent out a few friend requests.

After we all made it home early Sunday morning (hey we’re not THAT old – at least we think we’re not), the Facebook fun continued. My email account pinged all day letting me know I’d been tagged in a photo here, someone commented on a photo there, etc. Yes the cameras were out Saturday night, and the contents of those cameras got uploaded, tagged, and commented upon all day Sunday. In fact, I was tagged in one photo that had the caption “Brownwood High School geezers from class of __.”

As far as Facebook goes, I’ll bet stories like this occur all over the country by the thousands. Provided that Facebook keeps its financial house in order, they’re here for the long haul I think.

So, what’s the connection to SoftLayer here? Easy. We have a lot of customers who provide apps on Facebook. The infrastructure for those apps is hosted at SoftLayer. Consequently, we’re big cheerleaders for Facebook and the apps that run upon it. Go go go!

I’ve recently discovered the TV show Mad Men, which is well into its second or third season now, and is just an awesomely good time. If you haven’t seen it or heard about it, the basic premise is this:

That’s about it. There are a lot of layers on top of that, but the heart of the show is a Lucky Strike and a whiskey neat. The main character is Don Draper, the coolest cat who ever cooled. He wakes up with perfectly combed hair, knows all the right things to say and owns more suits than Men’s Warehouse.

The scene (or line, actually) that got me writing was one where Don Draper is hanging out with some beatniks listening to Miles Davis and ends up getting into an argument with one of them about “Conformity VS Rebellion”. Don represents the suit wearing, 9-to-5’ers and the beatnik represents the free-spirited bohemian lifestyle. An unrelated incident brings the police to the building and the beatniks are all scared to go outside because of them. Eventually Don gets tired of arguing (I can’t imagine he’s tired of the Miles Davis. Everyone loves Miles Davis), and decides to leave. The following exchange takes place:

Beatnik: Hey man, you can’t go out there.. there are cops outside.

Don Draper: “….You can’t”

And then he leaves. Of course, the cop outside gives him no hassle at all, and the audience yells “Oh Snap!” Well, I did anyway.

This illustrates a personal philosophy of mine that I’m happy to say we use in a lot of aspects at SoftLayer, and that is “Dress to impress”. Whether you want to think about it or not, your wardrobe is going to tell people a lot about you before you ever get a chance to. This goes for a lot of other areas as well, not just your pants and jacket.

If your desk is cluttered up with papers, I’m going to assume you’ve got too much work. Or you are sloppy.

If your passenger seat is full of stuff, I’m going to assume that you never have passengers, which means you probably live alone.

Conversely if your car is uncluttered in any way I’m going to assume you never drive it.

The same goes for your web page, your order forms, your forums. All of these things sway the needle of the “Good/Bad” scale one way or another, and most of the time it’s really, really subtle.

At SoftLayer we spend a LOT of time on attention to detail. Our datacenter is so clean you can eat off the floor, and it doesn’t happen by accident. When people walk into the room I want them to say “wow!” and I’m happy to say that it happens every time.